May 1993--Pump Blows Up; Shawn Departs
My pump poem, "5/7/93," in one of the last Poetry packets, was written about something that actually happened that morning on campus. You can read the basic details in the poem:
The pump blew up
Oh, shoot
Water's off
At 8 A.M. to boot
Whole campus is out
Till the afternoon, we're told
We hate it when this happens
Water becomes gold
Hope you took your shower
Before it all went off
If not, no one'll notice--
Their own hair's bad enough
Fix our pump for us
And on the lake's sand
We'll bow down and worship you
And the magic wrench in your hand
No, I don't remember the exact time the water came back on. I had taken my shower the night before, so I had good hair that morning. Clarissa still had her bottled water.
Probably some time in May, when we all watched TV together in Krueger lounge, a news brief came on about a drug bust in Kenosha. Pearl laughed in chagrin. Apparently Kenosha was such a quiet town that such things were unheard-of.
My diary entry for 5/10 at 2:01am: "Something I just read in May 8th's devotional [My Utmost for His Highest] made me realize, I don't have to worry that I won't 'find someone.' I just need to be patient and remember that the unforeseen often happens." And I was right about that.
In May, a speaker for InterVarsity, Pastor Don, brought his two college-age sons, cute Matt and cuter Dan. I helped Pearl entertain them--a pleasant task. A group of us spent a fun evening in the Pub, with the guys playing pool. Eventually, Rush Limbaugh came on the Pub TV. We sat there ripping on him, and Muskie Pat, who was working behind the bar said, "If he says anything about femi-nazis, I'm gonna throw something at the screen." One of Don's sons said, "The scary thing is, when you really listen to him, Rush is right." That didn't mean he liked Rush or the terms he had for groups or people or any of that.
(Muskie Pat is what we called a cool guy who had been at Roanoke for years getting several degrees, and who worked in the Muskie all the years I knew him.)
Pastor Don spoke on relationships. This clip from a letter I wrote to Shawn gives a sample of what he said, and how it affected me: "Sure I'd had some serious thoughts in the past few weeks of just giving it all up because of all the trouble I had dealing with you and I didn't know if the relationship was healthy for me. But I'd decided I just couldn't: we'd been through so much together, confided so many things in each other. And then the Thursday before, when the speaker came up from Racine to speak at the Bible study, he talked about relationships of all kinds. Friends stay there for friends, he said, even when being around them is currently making you feel bad. Whether the person's depressed or depressing or just in a bad mood, a friend doesn't go away, a friend stays right there with them. I took that as an answer from God to my prayers for help in deciding."
Just before we all had finals and left for home for the summer, Shawn called me or I called him. He got nasty to me on the phone and made me sob my eyes out, when I could've been there to listen to him and give him a shoulder to cry on. I had no idea that his brother had just died, and he didn't tell me. I would have understood. In fact, I didn't find out until Julie told me in a letter that summer; they were both staying on campus. I never expected to see him again, since he was only at Roanoke for two years to take general studies courses before going to UW-Madison for engineering. This was hardly the good-bye I had expected.
My home church now had early morning services at 8:00 as well as the regular, 10:45 service. My parents wanted to go to the early service, so I had to, as well. After all, I didn't have a car. They thought these would be the most popular services, but they weren't, and soon were dropped. However, for the summer I had to endure them. They were too early, and had too much singing. It was weird to sing lyrics projected on a wall; I preferred to read them from a hymnbook.
Just before the end of the school year, the Campus Shop had sold used textbooks which were no longer going to be used for classes. I took this opportunity to buy a Spanish textbook. Now, I used the Spanish textbook to teach myself Spanish. I used index cards and a pencil to make flash cards for the vocabulary words, and I think I would erase them and write new words on them. I also used a slate and slate pencil which I had gotten at a South Bend museum when I was a child. Just like the first ones I had bought, these were now broken. When I got this slate, I also got another one, but it was now lost, so out of three slates and more than one slate pencil, I only had one of each left. But they were useful for writing out the book's exercises without using up a lot of paper. We also had a computer disc with a Spanish drill program on it, and I used it sometimes. The problem, however, was that I had no one to tell me how to pronounce the words properly, and had nothing but the textbook to guide me. I don't think the book even mentioned that the X was pronounced differently than in English, though I already knew Mexico was pronounced "MEH-ee-koh" (or a reasonable equivalent).
In general, I enjoyed my summer and its pleasant routines. But every morning, at least after June, I agonized until the mail came. I kept expecting a letter from Shawn: angry, apologetic, whatever, but something. A letter never came, which made me even more upset. I'd sent him a letter to try to resolve the issue of our last conversation and the lack of a proper good-bye, but nothing had happened to move it along. I wanted closure, not this torture of waiting.
I wrote two or three letters to Shawn that summer. I let each of them sit, waiting until I was sure it was the right thing to do and rightly worded. About the last one, I wrote, "I wrote it late in the week, and for the next few days I kept hearing and reading things that said, Hurry, do it, send it, write it, do it now! So I decided I'd send it by Monday, or else God might really be unhappy with me. The messages were in songs, in my devotions, and maybe other places, and I thought, This can't just be coincidence; this has got to be God talking to me! I almost felt like my excuses for waiting were just excuses."
I began to think about James again. I wondered if I would go out with him junior year. Getting back together with Peter was too uncertain to count on, and Shawn had now left RC as he had planned, so this was my one hope to find love again. So I thought at the time.
I would listen to the downstairs stereo while washing dishes each afternoon. I'd recently discovered Q101, a new alternative station from Chicago, and when the TV antenna was positioned just right, I could get it in quite well. We had a powerful antenna with controls, and it could be linked to the radio as well.
My mom now had an old trunk. It had been passed down from mother to daughter for several generations, and now that Grandma Carter had died, it had been passed to Mom. It was full of mementos, pictures, trinkets, and tools from the past generations, including hat pins, straight razors, newspaper clippings, and a stereoscope with pictures. I didn't understand how to use the stereoscope, that you're supposed to adjust it to get a three-dimensional image, but I did love slipping in and looking at the 1870s pictures of a relationship from courtship to marriage. The trunk would be mine when Mom died (God forbid it happen until a long, long time has passed), and I wondered what Mom and I would put in it for the next generation. (I looked through this same trunk with Pearl and Sharon on the night before my wedding, finding amusing newspaper clippings, and my future husband, Cugan, would one day show me how to use the stereoscope.)